Hanseatic Merchants and the Procurement of Palm Oil and Rubber for Wilhelmine Germany’s New Industries, 1850–1918 SAMUEL ELEAZAR WENDT Faculty of Social and Cultural Sciences, Europa-Universität Viadrina, Große Scharrnstraße 59, 15230 Frankfurt (Oder), Germany. Email: euv45218@europa-uni.de This article analyses the reorientation of Hanseatic merchants’ involvement in world trade during the second half of the nineteenth and first decades of the twentieth centuries. This shift was influenced by the independence of former British and Iberian colonies in the Americas, which caused the implosion of colonial trade monopolies. The abolition of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, and the Scramble for Africa also allowed German commerce to obtain more direct access to markets in and raw materials from tropical regions. An examination of the commodity chains of rubber and palm oil/kernels reveals the great influence of Hanseatic merchant families (e.g. O’Swald, Schramm or Woermann) on determining and shaping the terms by which African and South American regions became incorporated into the emerging world economy. In 1909, the Colonial Economic Committee, one of the leading colonial societies in Wilhelmine Germany, published a report entitled Unsere Kolonialwirtschaft in ihrer Bedeutung für Industrie und Arbeiterschaft. The report aimed to inform its readers about the significant increase in trade with the colonies and the importance of tropical raw materials for industrial manufacture, highlighting the economic interdependence between colonial trade and domestic labour conditions. The seven chapters following the introduction deal with the most important raw materials and are arranged in descending order of importance, thus reflecting the significance of each commodity for Wilhelmine industry, its economy and trade. The first chapter is dedicated to cotton. During the nineteenth century, cotton fabrics became more accessible to broader consumer groups, following the mechanisation of production processes, cotton spinning and weaving. Soon after the unification of Germany in 1871, the European Review, Vol. 26, No. 3, 430–440 © 2018 Academia Europæa doi:10.1017/S1062798718000121